by Gail Bowen
Dan gave the boy the high sign. “I’m impressed,” he said. “Let’s get rolling.” Dan turned back to me. “I’ll keep eight tomorrow open for Bryn. Bring her yourself if you have to.”
“I’ll do my best,” I said. “Dan, I’d like to go inside and check out some of the films that came from Evan’s office. I shouldn’t be long.”
“Stay as long as you like,” he said. “You won’t be in my way. I have back-to-back appointments all morning.”
Even the warmth of Dan’s welcoming home couldn’t dispel the chill I felt when I contemplated Jill’s future. The night of the rehearsal dinner, as Jill stood between Angus’s torches, swathed in the soft folds of her timeless velvet cloak, it seemed she had finally gotten it right. In that incandescent moment, everything seemed possible for her. Now it was clear that no matter what Jill did, her story wouldn’t end with “happily ever after.”
As I came into the living room, I was overwhelmed with despair. For days, I’d been fuelled by adrenaline, responding to the unimaginable, reacting, deciding, hoping against hope. Now the heart had gone out of me. I was sick of tragedy and death. In the words of the old Spirit of the West song, all I wanted was to turn my head and walk, walk away.
But if the last days had taught me anything it was that, wherever I walked, trouble would follow.
I sank to my knees and began hunting through one of the boxes of tapes that had been sent from Evan’s office in Toronto. My search was perfunctory, but The Glass Coffin wasn’t hard to spot. The other tapes were obviously works-in-progress with titles and dates hand-printed on their spines. The Glass Coffin was in a paper sleeve with the name and address of a film and video processing company printed on the box and a computerized label describing the box’s contents: The Unblinking Eye: The Glass Coffin, Seamless Master, Length: 44.58 minutes. (Textless @ Tail), ChI2: Stereo Mix. There were other notations, too cryptic for me, but I knew at once I’d found the tape Evan had sold to the network.
I put it in the machine and pressed play. In seconds, the room was filled with the hauntingly elegiac “Pavanne for a Dead Princess” by Maurice Ravel. On screen, the ruffled deep-mauve petals of a perfect rose bloomed slowly in the soft morning light. A woman began to speak. “Even their names are beautiful,” she said. “Shropshire Lad, Abellard, Cajun Dancer, Gabriel’s Fire, Dakota, Black Magic, Callisto, Natasha Monet, Flamingo, Cachet, Cadenza, Hand in Hand, Lasting Peace.” The camera pulled back, revealing as it moved a fairy-tale profusion of roses in the extravagantly gorgeous hues of early summer: deep rose, soft pink, apricot, lemon, pale peach, cream, burgundy, magenta. As the distance between the camera and the roses increased, the vibrant life of the garden ebbed, making the petals seem less a product of nature than of an artist’s broken brushwork.
The woman’s seductive contralto continued. “It’s been forty years since I felt the sun like a hand on my back as I bent to the earth; forty years since I knew that numinous moment when the scent of growing roses perfumes the air. For forty years, I’ve watched the world from behind a wall of glass.”
When the camera moved to the woman’s face, I was struck by how young Caroline MacLeish appeared to be. Evan’s lighting of his mother had been benevolent, but Caroline’s agelessness went beyond a filmmaker’s trick. Like the cloistered nuns of my childhood, Caroline had been sheltered from the harsh rays of the world’s scrutiny, and, like them, her complexion retained the faint pearl-like aura of youth when chronological youth was just a memory.
There were no flashbacks to still photographs of Caroline as she had been before the postpartum incident that circumscribed her life. Evan’s interest was clearly less in what had shaped Caroline than in how Caroline had shaped her world. The first minutes of the movie followed Caroline through the small ceremonies of her day: her hour in bed with Indian tea and the newspapers; her careful coordination of her makeup, clothing, and accessories; her diligent study of current medical journals and the Internet for the latest information about her illness; her supervision of the plantings and prunings in her rose garden. It was impossible not to pity this woman who hadn’t felt the wind on her face or been touched by a raindrop for four decades. But as Evan enlarged his focus to include the secondary players in Caroline’s drama, sympathy turned to revulsion. One by one, the members of Caroline’s inner circle – Evan, Claudia, Tracy, Bryn – made their entrances. All approached Caroline with the pitiful eagerness of beggars seeking alms; all left with nothing more than scraps of her attention. No matter how often they were ignored or rejected, they kept coming back – arms outstretched, eyes wary but hopeful. Evan’s portrait of the power of the clinical narcissist was devastating. It also raised some provocative questions about the filmmaker and his subject. Had Evan been aware of what his film revealed about Caroline or had years of living with her blinded him to the truth? And what about Caroline? What had she seen when she looked at footage of The Glass Coffin? A dutiful son’s tribute to his mother or betrayal? One thing was certain. The film proved that Jill had been wrong about her mother-in-law – Caroline MacLeish was a monster.
When I heard the outside door open, I was so certain it was Dan, I didn’t even turn my glance from the screen. “You have to see this,” I said. “Not just because it will give you insight into Bryn, but because you could build your career on this woman.”
On screen, Caroline was commiserating with Tracy. “Sometimes the wisest thing is simply to accept the fact that the best part of your life is over. Why fight the truth?
“Acting is for the young, and you’re no longer young. From now on, the spotlight will always be on someone else.” Caroline placed a finger under Tracy’s chin so she could tilt the younger woman’s face towards her own. “Let’s not have any more talk about you starting a new life,” she said in her warm voice. “You have a life, Tracy – here in this house, with us.”
“So you found The Glass Coffin.” Felix Schiff’s voice was a shock, but not an unpleasant one.
I glanced over at him. He was still dressed for outdoors. “Take off your jacket and boots and come sit by me,” I said. “I could use some company. How did you know where I was?”
“I didn’t,” he said. “I was looking for Jill. Your son thought she’d brought Bryn over here.”
“They left,” I said. “They’re probably back at my house by now.”
Felix removed his coat and boots and threw them in the corner of the living room – it was an uncharacteristically thoughtless move, but given the fact that his eyes hadn’t once left the TV screen, an understandable one. “I don’t need to see Jill any more,” he said. “I found what I was looking for.”
“The Glass Coffin,” I said. “I don’t think there’s any doubt now that this was the film Evan sold NBC as the pilot.”
I handed him the box the tape had come in.
“He’s a Judas,” Felix spit the epithet. “What kind of man would betray his mother for a handful of silver and a moment of fame?”
“No one betrayed Caroline MacLeish.” I pointed at the television screen. “Look at her. She knew she was being filmed.”
“Of course she knew she was being filmed,” Felix shouted. “But that movie was never intended to be a commercial property. That film was supposed to be a research tool. It was Caroline’s gift to the world.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Don’t blame yourself,” he said. “True altruism is rare. You can be forgiven for not recognizing it. Allowing herself to be the subject of a film was excruciating for Caroline. She’s an intensely private person, but she knew the medical community needed to be shown the limitations of its thinking.” Felix threw the empty film box on the table in front of us. “Caroline said psychiatry was still a primitive discipline – in its infancy.”
“And The Glass Coffin was supposed to add to the body of knowledge,” I said.
“Exactly. Caroline wanted the doctors who had presented themselves as her saviours to see that she could triumph without them
.”
On screen Caroline was staring into the camera. Her eyes were startling – the blue of forget-me-nots. “I used to believe that John Milton was right,” she said. “That ‘the mind is its own place, and in itself/can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n.’ For years I blamed myself for what my life had become. I convinced myself that I had taken heav’n and turned it to hell. The moment I realized that my mind was more complex than anything a seventeenth-century man could have imagined, I was freed – if not into a fully realized life, at least into a life. The mind may be ‘its own place,’ but the superior mind can make accommodations – ensure that it has what it needs to feed it, to keep it from being conquered.”
My stomach clenched. This was beyond hubris; this was insanity.
Felix gripped my hand with excitement. “There,” he said. “Now you can see it. Fate wounded Caroline, but she used her intelligence and spirit to heal herself. She’s incomparable.”
I was dumbfounded. “You’re in love with her,” I said.
“I’ve loved her for twenty-five years. We plan to marry, but we have to wait.”
“For what?” I said.
“For her family to accept us. The health of the household on Walmer Road means everything to Caroline. She was afraid our marriage would introduce an element of instability that would disturb the balance.”
It was an effort to keep my jaw from dropping. “The balance,” I repeated.
Felix’s eyes were glazed, and there was a sheen of sweat on his upper lip. “Caroline knew how much every member of that household relied on her. Everything she said or did had to be exquisitely calibrated to maintain the equilibrium.” There had always been a certain boyish athleticism about Felix, but as he leaned forward to stare at the screen he was a shell, like a building that had been gutted by fire. “Are you beginning to understand now, Joanne?” he asked softly. “We wanted nothing more than to be together, but she was prepared to sacrifice her happiness for her family’s sake. And I had to sacrifice too.”
“What have you sacrificed, Felix?” I asked.
He looked at me from unseeing eyes. “Self-respect, friendship, honour.” He drew his hands together as if in prayer. “And now comes the final sacrifice. She said it might come to this. That’s why she gave me the gun.”
Felix took the remote control from my hand and pressed pause. On screen, Caroline was frozen in the pool of deep gold light cast by the antique lamp behind her chair. Out of nowhere came a memory of a paperweight from my childhood: a chunk of amber that preserved a lifeless but still perfect wasp.
Suddenly, I was numb with fear. “What are you going to do?” I said.
When Felix pulled out his cellphone, I almost laughed with relief. The cell as a lifeline to the real world was a cliché of the film industry. But as Felix tapped in a number and waited for an answer, he was not a comic figure. He was as tightly wound as a man calling to hear medical test results that he knew would spell his doom.
As he listened to the voice on the other end of the line, it seemed the screws were tightening.
“It’s over,” he said. “People have seen the film. The network is committed to showing it. There’s nothing more I can do. Not about The Glass Coffin – not about anything. I have the sense that I’m being followed. That can mean only one thing. The police know it was me.” As he listened to the response to his words, Felix hung his head, a schoolboy being chastised. “You have nothing to fear,” he said finally. “There’s no way they can connect you to any of this. They could rip the tongue out of my mouth before I’d tell them anything.” He fell silent again, taking in every word. Then for the first time since he walked into the room, the weight seemed to have been lifted from his shoulders. “Yes,” he said. “I have it with me. You promise it will be that way? That’s more than I could have hoped. A double exit – with our souls leaving our bodies at the same moment.” He smiled to himself. “I’ll wait for your call.”
Felix placed the cell carefully on the table in front of him, then he took a small pistol and two bullets from his jacket pocket. His hands were trembling, but he had no trouble inserting the bullets in their chambers.
“There,” he said, looking down at the loaded gun in his hand. “I’m ready. Nothing to do now but wait.”
“She’s not worth it,” I said. Uncensored and unwise, the words tumbled out of my mouth. “Felix, she’s using you. Look at the movie. She uses everybody. She’s evil and manipulative. She’s destroyed so many lives already. Don’t let her destroy yours.” I moved towards him and reached out to touch his hand. “Listen to me,” I said. “You know I’m right.”
“You couldn’t be more wrong,” he said, and his voice was tinged with pity. “My life began the night I met Caroline MacLeish. All I’ve ever wanted was to share my life with her fully, deeply, completely. Her family kept us from sharing our lives. I cannot allow anyone to keep us from sharing our deaths.”
Felix’s face was wax-pale, drained, but his eyes had the zealot’s glow. The metamorphosis of ein prakiter Mensch into madman was mesmerizing. When he changed the position of the gun, it took me a moment to realize that, suddenly, the muzzle was pointing at me.
CHAPTER
13
For a few moments, Felix and I sat in silence – both of us staring stupidly at the gun in his hand. I had no idea what he was thinking, but I was running through my options and there weren’t many. Given what I had to work with, even Ken Dryden would have had trouble stopping the action.
For the next twenty minutes, Dan Kasperski would be in his office, in a garage that had studio-quality soundproofing so that he could practise his drums without alienating his neighbours. When he’d advised me to choose an electronic kit for Angus, Dan had demonstrated his acoustic drums. Inside the garage, they were ear-splitting, but outside, even the wildest riff was just a muffled thump. No matter how loud I screamed, there would be no help from that quarter.
And I had no idea how to appeal to the man who was aiming the gun at me. During the time I’d been a political panellist on “Canada Tonight,” Felix and I had a good working relationship, but we had never fraternized outside the show. I had no reservoir of warm feelings to draw upon and no real understanding of what made him tick.
“I can’t let you go.” Felix’s voice was too loud, and he flushed with embarrassment. “I apologize. I didn’t mean to shout. This is difficult for me. I’m not a cruel man, but I can’t take the chance that you’ll send someone in here to stop me.”
Outside, a car alarm began its rhythmic bray. The sound was an irritating staple of the urban soundscape, but Felix started as if it were a threat. The hand holding the gun moved so that the muzzle was less than six inches away from my breastbone. Fear is a powerful stimulus. Suddenly, everything fell away except the problem at hand. “If you kill me, there’ll be no one left to tell your story,” I said. “All there will be is Evan’s film.”
“A distortion,” he said.
“Then you’ve seen it.”
Felix looked stricken. “I didn’t have to. I know that it’s a spiteful, twisted character assassination of a woman who deserves to be venerated. She saved my life, Joanne.”
“How?” I asked.
“By loving me,” he said.
“That’s reason enough for loyalty.”
“My feelings for Caroline go beyond loyalty. I worship her.”
“Then tell me about her. If I’m to be the keeper of your story, I should know everything.”
“The keeper of my story. I like that,” he said, but he didn’t lower the gun. “I was twenty-five when we met. A very young man from a very small town, who’d made a film about a boy who fell in love with a saint.”
“Autobiographical?” I asked.
Felix shrugged, “Aren’t all first films? The movie was crude and naïve, but it seemed to lend itself to interpretation, so it enjoyed a certain success.”
“Is that how you came to Toronto?” I asked.
“Ye
s,” he said. “And in Toronto, I found Annie Lowell, who introduced me to the concept of life as an extreme sport.”
“I saw Black Spikes and Slow Waves,” I said.
“Then you know that I was self-destructing. I would have died the way Annie did, if Caroline hadn’t redeemed me.” He fell silent.
“Another saint in your life,” I said.
Felix smiled. “There are always patterns,” he said. “But Caroline wasn’t an ideal. She was a flesh-and-blood woman. The night I met her I was at my lowest point. Annie and I had been at a party and she told me she was tired of having me hang around like a whipped dog. So of course when she left the party, I followed her to the house on Walmer Road.”
“She and Evan were still living together when you had your affair?”
Felix’s laugh was bitter. “Our affair meant nothing to Annie, but it meant everything to me. That night I was wasted on booze and drugs – a wreck of a human being abasing himself in every possible way. Annie did what people do with whipped dogs. She gave me a couple of verbal kicks and threw me out. I pounded on the door, begging to be taken back. For once, Fate was kind. Caroline answered the door.” His eyes shone at the memory. “She invited me in. This exquisite woman had created a closed private world, where no one could follow her, but she chose me to be a part of it. I was the only one, and I stayed.”
“You were lovers.”
“Lovers, comrades, friends, confidantes – everything. She had no one.”
“She had a house full of people, Felix – her own children, her granddaughter, Annie, Tracy.”
“None of them measured up. Evan especially was a disappointment.”
“In what way?”
“He needed other women.”
“Women other than whom?”
“Other than Caroline. She didn’t understand it. She said that the only woman Evan ever truly loved was his first wife.”
“Linn Brokenshire?”